Title	Professor, Programme Director
Qualifications	BA, DPhill (Oxon)
Subject area	Literature and Film
Room	CBB 1.053
Telephone	+44 (0) 1782 733016
Fax
Email	o.c.g.harris@ams.keele.ac.uk

I teach literature and film - mainly film - and have a large administrative job in American Studies, but my specialism is the writer William S. Burroughs. I met him back in the 1980s and ‘90s, I’ve written about him and been privileged to edit a number of his works, and I have also supervised and examined numerous PhDs about him. If you’re at all interested in Burroughs, you’re welcome to get in touch, and for the premier Burroughs website, you should check out Reality Studio.

While I do teach literature, in recent years I mostly teach film modules, including Hooray for Hollywood? Approaches to American Film and Alfred Hitchcock’s America, both at Level 2. I have also taught modules about and published essays on film noir in Les Cahiers de CIRCAV (2002) and in Cinema Journal (2003), and written a study of Hemingway and Hollywood in Literature and the Visual Media (2005).

My Burroughs research goes back to the D.Phil I completed at Oxford, and since then I’ve edited a series of books: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959 (1993), a fiftieth anniversary edition of his first novel, Junky: the definitive text of “Junk” (2003), his epistolary novella, The Yage Letters Redux (2006), and Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008). In addition to my full-length critical study, William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003), I’ve also published many articles on Burroughs in journals and collections, and given conference papers about editing theory and practice.

My most recent projects include the publication of a collection of essays to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Naked Lunch in 2009, co-edited with Ian MacFadyen. To mark the anniversary of Burroughs' greatest novel, I co-organised a series of events during June and July 2009 Paris followed by events in Bristol (September), in New York (October) and San Francisco (November). You can find further information on a special anniversary website and can also read the keynote address I gave at Columbia University . I am currently working on a new, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Burroughs' early novel, Queer , to appear in 2010.

As well as my Burroughs work, I have researched and written about the Beat movement more broadly, publishing essays in Beat Culture: The 1950s and Beyond (1999), College Literature (2000), Twentieth Century Literature (2000), Reconstructing the Beats (2003), Beat Culture: Lifestyle, Icons and Impact (2005), and The Encyclopedia of Beat Literature (2007). My latest publication is an essay on the “exquisite corpse” game for a book collection about Surrealism.

Oliver Harris' Homepage

For the premier Burroughs website, check out Reality Studio

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